Events Archives

April 2019

Join us on April 26 for a presentation by Farzana Haniffa of her paper "Documenting Ethno-Religious Violence in Post War Sri Lanka: Lessons From the Recent Past". The paper reflects her experience of documenting the violence of Aluthgama in 2014 and the recent violence in Digana in the Kandy district in March 2018. Event Details: Featuring: Farzana Haniffa (University of Colombo, and Smuts Visiting Fellow, University of Cambridge) Respondent: Thushara Hewage (University of Ottawa) Moderator: Vasuki Nesiah (NYU Gallatin) When:…

Join us for a lecture by Samia Khatun based on her new book ‘Australianama: The South Asian Odyssey in Australia‘, on April 18. The book challenges a central idea that powerfully shapes history books across the Anglophone world: the colonial myth that European knowledge traditions are superior to the epistemologies of the colonized. Arguing that Aboriginal and South Asian language sources are keys to the vast, complex libraries that belie colonized geographies, Khatun shows that stories in colonized tongues can transform the very…

Join us for a panel discussion on the topic of ‘Secularism, Secularisation, and History: Colonial Inheritances and Contemporary Comparisons'. Neilesh Bose (University of Victoria) will review recent scholarship on secularism and secularisation in South Asia, as well as turn to history, especially colonial history, to offer a preview of his current book in progress, which aims to add to the debates on secularism in the contemporary by historicizing how South Asians have imagined, defined and compared religions in the modern past.…

March 2019

Speaker: Chris Fuller, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at London School of Economics Discussant: David Ludden, Professor of History at New York University Paper Abstract: H. H. Risley, author of The Tribes and Castes of Bengal (1891) and The People of India (1908), and the 1901 census commissioner, was the pre-eminent anthropologist of British India, as well as a high-ranking Indian Civil Service officer. Risley has been discussed and usually criticized by all modern scholars of colonial anthropology in India. But modern…

An Event Co-Sponsored with Center for Global Asia Speakers: Sunil Amrith and Francis Bradley Topic: Mobility and Territoriality Around the Indian Ocean, 1750-1950 Schedule: 4:00- 5:15. Francis Bradley, Pratt Institute Title: Mecca to Southeast Asia: The Patani Islamic Knowledge Networks Abstract: In the nineteenth century, Mecca became far more accessible to Muslims around the globe. A contingent of exiles from Patani, a Malay kingdom that once comprised territory on both sides of the current Malay-Thai border and that had been…

Please join us for a screening of the documentary, Lynch Nation, directed by Shaheen Ahmed and Ashfaque Ej. This event includes a discussion of a Human Rights Watch report on cow protection violence in India (view the report here). The discussion and a Q&A session will be lead by Jayshree Bajoria, author of the report, and Suchitra Vijayan, Director of The Polis Project. Event Details: When: Friday, March 1, 4-6 pm Where: Avery Fisher Center (AFC), Bobst Library, 7th Floor, 70 Washington Square South,…

In this talk, Meena Kandasamy, Gallatin’s Global Faculty-in-Residence and author of The Gypsy Goddess (Harper, 2014), discusses her site-responsive chronicle of the Dharmapuri atrocity which occurred in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu. On one day in October 2012, in response to the love affair between a caste-Hindu Vanniyar woman and a Dalit man, the homes of 300 Dalit people were burned. Kandasamy reflects on the event, explores how one bears witness to violence and the social realities of India’s caste-embattled…

October 2018

Briana Blasko will share her photographic journey about the making of her latest book, Within Without: The Path of the Yogi. Over a period of four years she travelled across India and Nepal, observing the lives of practising Jains, Buddhists, Sufis and Hindus, and a Catholic priest. Although the photographs reflect a belonging to specific religions, this work is not intended to be about religion; rather, it aims to show the interconnectedness of the spiritual life. Briana Blasko is a…

Taxonomies of identity and histories of activism in the U.S and Europe cannot be seamlessly mapped onto other societies. To think of sexual politics, broadly, is to suspend the rubrics of feminist, LGBT, and queer activism, in our attempt to understand how gender and sexuality get politicized both as categories of identity, and as categories of analysis in a particular society. This panel is an invitation to think comparatively about sexual subcultures across South Asia and the Middle East (and…

Meena Kandasamy, Gallatin’s Global Faculty in Residence, combines her love for the written word with the struggle for social justice through poetry, translation, fiction, and essays. Her latest novel, When I Hit You: Or, The Portrait of the Writer As A Young Wife (Atlantic, 2017), a work of autofiction exploring poetry, the dark heart of language, French feminist philosophy, and leftist discourse to lift the veil on the silence surrounding domestic violence and marital rape in India, was chosen as a…

Raga music has become increasingly popular as audiences are drawn to this North Indian classical tradition. The film, Raga Revelry, is an introduction to the centuries-old philosophy and beautiful sound that evokes a vivid range of emotions and moods and invites the listener to transcend their personality self. The viewer is transported to the heart of Indian culture through one man’s journey to create a permanent sanctuary in modern India for this rich music. Vijay Kichlu, a renowned musicologist…

September 2018

Joint Event with Postcolonial, Race and Diaspora Studies Colloquium (Department of English) Award-winning author and scholar, Meena Alexander will read from her recently published collection of poetry Atmospheric Embroidery, a haunting collection of poems that “travels through zones of violence to reach the crystalline depth of words”, and discuss Name Me a Word: Indian Writers Reflect on Writing, an anthology which brings together the voices of twentieth- and twenty-first century writers from India and the diaspora. Event will be followed by…

Cosponsored event with The Polis Project Join Dr. Mona Bhan and Dr. Haley Duschinski in conversation with Suchitra Vijayan, about their recently published edited book, Resisting Occupation in Kashmir, which analyzes the social and legal logic of India's occupation of Kashmir in relation to colonialism, militarization, power, democracy, and sovereignty, focusing specifically on the years between 2010 and 2014. Foregrounding the voices of Kashmiri scholars, the book traces how Kashmiri youth used music, rap, art, and other modes of cultural production to reimagine…

May 2018

(Cosponsored event with India China Institute at The New School) Professor Gopal Guru's talk on Democracy, Caste and Hindu Nationalism will address issues of caste politics, capitalism and solidarity in India. The discussion will be moderated by David Ludden (Department of History, NYU). Professor Gopal Guru is eminent political theorist and scholar and a highly regarded teacher based at the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Earlier, he taught at the University of Delhi and the University of Pune. Later this year,…

(Co-sponsored event with NYU Elmer Holmes Bobst Library) The archive has been the subject of much scholarship, being variously defined as a collection of papers, personal or state-sponsored or some combination of the two, that forms the foundation of historical narratives. This presentation will explore one particular recent archive, an ongoing multilingual collection of papers of the Bombay poets which resides now at Cornell University. Crossing the divide between personal and the institutional, this archive contains a unique set of…

April 2018

This year marks the 5th anniversary of the Rana Plaza building collapse, which resulted in the tragic loss of over 1134 workers’ lives, with thousands more workers injured. The scale of the Rana Plaza disaster raised global awareness about the harsh conditions of global fast fashion. In this panel, we bring together Bangladeshi and US-based artists, activists and scholars to reflect on Rana Plaza 5 years later. In addition to marking the violence and tragedy of…

What do you do after getting a bachelors in engineering, a masters in biophysics and computational biology and yet another masters in neuroscience from one of the most prestigious universities in the world? You give up your job and go on a solo backpacking adventure around the world. Mauktik Kulkarni did one further. After biking solo through South America and backpacking across 36 countries around the world he went on an adventure trip through the place…

In December 2017, when custodial deaths due to torture became a prominent issue in Maharashtra, the Director General of Police reportedly sent an internal circular requesting the use of forensic science methods mentioning lie detector, brain mapping and narcoanalysis tests. The Indian police began using the three techniques a couple of decades ago to gain information despite the lack of any scientific grounding for these forensic techniques. In a context where physical torture is the norm and custodial deaths…

This workshop brings together graduate students and faculty who are working on South Asia across different social science disciplines and fields. The meetings will offer students a chance to develop their scholarship and projects through discussions with students and faculty. Each meeting will involve the presentation of a graduate student's current work-in-progress and will include a lunch. About the talk: The Foreigners' Registration Office (FRO) in India has complex rules for Pakistani citizens, making it difficult for Pakistani Hindu…

Talk by Baidik Bhattacharya, University of Delhi (Joint event with Postcolonial Colloquium) Are we really into a “postcritical” phase of literary studies, as Rita Felski’s controversial book claims? Have we been able to successfully dismantle what she calls, following Paul Ricoeur, “the hermeneutics of suspicion”? Since her argument is firmly anchored in “literature” and practices of “reading,” I argue in this paper, we need to revisit the foundational moment of the very modern concept of “literature” in the final…

March 2018

Talk by Srila Roy (University of Witwatersrand), chaired by Dina Siddiqi (BRAC University, Anthropology) This talk provides a glimpse into queerness as a way of life in contemporary Kolkata, India. It looks at the manner in which young metropolitan self-identified queer individuals are transforming their selves and modes of living: through somatic practices (like sex change) to the invention of alternative modes of kinship and belonging, both within and outside of the heteropatriarchal family. No longer hidden…

Guli's Children: Film Screening and Discussion (Cosponsored event with Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies) Film discussion will be moderated by Ritty Lukose (NYU Gallatin) About the film: Calicut (also known as GULI in Chinese) was an important node in the overall links between China and Kerala (south of India). The film brings out the cultural-historical ties, the physical artefacts and, most importantly, traces of human genealogy that survive between Kerala and China to this day. Spanning over two years of…